


breadcrumb trails

by bearonthecouch



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Post-Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:22:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24373480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bearonthecouch/pseuds/bearonthecouch
Summary: Persistence reveals the path.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	breadcrumb trails

Cal Kestis had spent five years hiding who he was, with no focus other than survival. Even his friendship with Prauf, the one friendship he had on Bracca, was tentative and filled with secrets. Cal didn’t trust anyone. His Master had seared that into him with his dying breath. 

But he couldn’t go back to that now. Too many people knew who he was - what he was. The Empire had him on their radar, and were actively searching for him, with bounty notices that called him a terrorist and a traitor. They were hunting for Cere, too, and for the  _ Mantis _ . 

The smart thing to do would be to abandon that ship and its crew, to find some other dead-end world where no one cared enough to ask questions about a stranger, so long as he could work. But he couldn’t just be some nameless shipbreaker anymore. He wasn’t a scrapyard rat. The long-dead part of him that had awakened in saving Prauf flared like a star now, and it refused to be dimmed. Little Cal the scrapper had become Cal Kestis, Jedi Knight.

So what now? 

He’d asked Cere and Greez, and Merrin, and they’d cleared their throats awkwardly and traded glances that carried the weight of worlds behind them, but in the end they’d all shrugged and looked back to him.

What now?

  
What now?

“Are you angry?” he asked Cere, and she softly padded up to the copilot’s seat where he was curled up. 

She let out a heavy sigh. “Not angry,” she admitted. “More like sad.” 

Yes, there was a depth of grieving within her, he could feel it through the Force. And it was for Trilla. And it was for the death of her dream of rebuilding the Jedi Order on the shoulders of young children. 

Now that Cal knew what happened to the Jedi the Empire captured, he knew he couldn’t subject any innocent being to that fate. Thus, the broken holocron. He’d told Cere that the fate of those children should be trusted to the Force. The words fell easily from his lips, but the concept of trust was more complicated than that. He’d followed Cordova’s breadcrumb trails, and meditated his way through painful memories, belonging both to him and to others, who left echoes of their presence behind in the objects they held close. If he was truly guided by the Force, as Cere believed, would the path have brought him to the literal fortress of the Dark Side? 

He’d seen Trilla cut down by her new Imperial Master in cold blood, supposedly for failing her mission. But she had brought both Cal and Cere to the Inquisitors’ stronghold. So the brutal sentence was for a different crime: the slight wavering, the hesitation, as Cere attempted to reach out to her. The Inquisitorious could not allow weakness or doubt. And this was the Empire that was hunting Cal now, evil personified in the black-cloaked form of Darth Vader. Trilla, for all her cruelty, was still human, even if warped and nearly broken. Cal wanted to believe that he could have saved her. Cere needed to believe that she could still have been saved. 

“It was easier when we had clues to follow,” Cal said softly. A path to follow. Persistence reveals the path.    
  
“Easier to follow orders, you mean?” Cere replied, and Cal surprised himself by nodding. But then, all his life he’d gone where others led him. Even on Bracca, he’d kept his head down and done what he was told. 

“The Jedi were always supposed to be peacekeepers,” Cal pointed out. And what he’d been doing, on this desperate quest for hope and for belonging, wasn’t peacekeeping. So many stormtroopers had fallen to his blades, first Master Tapal’s, and then Cere’s, reconstructed to become his own. There were men inside that armor. In his memories, those men had been something like friends. “And us, we’re in the middle of a war.”

Cal had been in the middle of the war almost all his life. Whatever the Jedi had once been, they were already walking a different path by the time Jaro Tapal had taken him on as apprentice. Of course, there had been other wars, stretching back millennia. Cal knew his history. The Light Side and the Dark Side ebbed and flowed, each one ascendant for a hundred years or a thousand years or more, until some domino tipped somewhere in the galaxy, causing Empires to shatter or Republics to implode. When he thought about it that way, the war seemed inevitable, and the choices he or Cere made hardly seemed to matter at all. 

But Cere had touched the dark side, and cut herself off from the Force rather than risk its toxic influence. And Cal wanted to believe he could fight on the side of Light, and be a Jedi who would make Master Tapal proud, instead of the weak, pathetic coward who had let him die. Hold the line. Persistence reveals the path.    
  
It was the kind of thing Master Tapal said all the time, a meditative phrase uttered with his large purple finger pressed against Cal’s forehead, as if literally driving it into the Padawan’s brain. Cal could hear the echoes of the words in his breathing, and he tilted his head to the side, to look at Cere. 

“The Empire will never stop looking for those children,” he said. Cere said nothing, so Cal continued, closing his eyes and reaching out to the Force for guidance. “We have to protect them. I have to,” he amended, when Cere was still silent. 

“Cal, you destroyed the holocron.”   
  
“I know.” He’d done it without offering Cere or anyone else on the  _ Mantis  _ an opportunity to voice their opinion. It had… felt right. Was that trust in the Force, or simple selfishness? “I don’t regret it. I just meant… those kids don’t need to be trained as Jedi.” Because the Jedi were… not exactly dead, but hidden. Like a seed buried deep in the dark soil, waiting to bloom in the future. When the time was right. Cere Junda was not a Jedi anymore, and Cal Kestis was, as far as he knew, the last Jedi Knight. “They need to be kept hidden from the Empire. If they use the Force, it will call the Inquisitors right to them.” It wasn’t fair that those children should be hunted without even knowing why.    
  
“We don’t know where they  _ are _ ,” Cere demanded.    
  
“I do.”

He’d taken only a brief look at the holocron, caught a handful of names. Kalli Starkiller. Cyrrus Morath. Ezra Bridger. But he could follow the Force as it led him from world to world, each planet bringing a glittering array of psychometric echoes, telling stories of trauma and death that squeezed tight around his heart like icy fingers. Cal damn well knew that his unique power could provide more insight than he wanted into the death of the Jedi and the rise of the Empire. His white-hot flashbacks of the massacre of the Nightsisters on Dathomir, or the echoes of the agonizing torture that broke Cere on Nur, made him hesitant to touch much of anything, no matter what information he might glean from it. 

But though the galaxy was living through dark times, there was light within it, too. There was hope. 

“They don’t even have to know we’re there,” he pleaded with Cere. “We’ll just… check in on them, from time to time.”

But even as he said it, he knew it would be far too dangerous. It would be tantamount to leading the Empire right to them, and it would undo the good of breaking the holocron in the first place. Cal already knew too much, if the monster Cere called the Dark Lord really did catch up to him, he might not be able to keep those few names he knew hidden forever. What if he broke under torture, and gave up the children he was supposed to be protecting? 

He glanced at Cere again, and his heart squeezed at the memory of her unraveling, as little Trilla Suduri looked up at her, bound into an interrogation chair, with hatred burning in her eyes. 

“Never mind,” he muttered, because it saved him from the awkwardness of trying to figure out what to say to Cere when she knew that he’d seen everything. 

He leaned his head back against the headrest of his seat, and blew out a heavy sigh. 

When he’d been following the holocron, he’d been walking  _ toward  _ something, at least. And now, he was just running away again. It felt exactly as if the last five years hadn’t happened. Cordova’s quest - Cere’s quest - had given him a purpose. What did he have now? 

“You don’t have to use the Force to be a peacekeeper, Cal,” Cere announced. He looked quizzically at her. “There are Imperial-held worlds all over the galaxy now. Hundreds of planets just like Bracca where people are forced to work in dangerous conditions for starvation wages.” Or no wages at all. There were worlds like Kashyyyk and Ryloth where whole populations were taken as slaves.

Cal nodded, slowly. When he’d been a Padawan he’d gone with Master Tapal on relief missions, to worlds burned by the Separatists or abandoned by one or both armies when their fighting was done. Just like Zeffo and Dathomir and every world the Empire had touched, the Clone Wars had left behind deep wells of pain and suffering, scorched the earth and left nothing behind in their wake. But there were still plenty of worlds that it wasn’t too late to save.

“That’s what you want to do?” he asked Cere carefully. “Be traveling aid workers?”

“Seems like the kind of thing the Jedi used to do. But I suppose we ought to ask Merrin and Greez.”

“And BD-1.”

Cere nodded agreement. 

“Do you still wish to be a Jedi?” Merrin asked Cal, later that night after the crew of the  _ Mantis  _ had come to the casual consensus that they should follow the lead of the Force toward planets that needed help. He was curled up on the couch of the _ Mantis _ ’s small lounge area, half asleep. Merrin leaned against the inside of the doorway, arms crossed over her chest as she studied him. Cal flipped up to a sitting position, and met her eyes. 

“Is that bad?” he asked her pointedly. 

“A Jedi slaughtered my sisters.”   
  
“That wasn’t a Jedi,” Cal insisted, and to his utter shock, Merrin nodded. She believed him. 

“I know.”

“How?”   
  
She shrugged. “My connection to the Force may be different from yours, but I can still recognize the Dark Side. The extermination of my people is the work of the Sith, not the Jedi.”

Cal remembered stories about the Sith, but had little practical information about them. But he trusted Merrin’s assessment, and he knew he needed this woman, who was neither Jedi nor Sith, to help him remember who he was as he picked a path through the galaxy’s New Order. 

“I  _ am  _ a Jedi,” Cal said, “But I think that means something different now than it used to. I may be the only one left.”

“As I am the last of my people.” 

“So we can’t go back, can we? The only way to go is forward.”

“We are survivors, Cal Kestis. But I think we may also be more than that.”   
  
“Peacemakers?” 

“I think I would like that,” Merrin agreed. 

The next morning, once Cal had caught a few hours sleep, he headed for the holographic galaxy map near the  _ Mantis _ ’s cockpit. 

“Where to?” Greez called from the pilot’s seat.. 

Cal punched in a set of coordinates, following the pull of the Force. And Greez jumped into hyperspace, trusting his crew. 


End file.
